My mother was dead.

I've known this since my oldest of my memories, that was the reason there were no pictures of her around the house as I grew up. It was too painful for my father so I never got to see her or what she looked like but I understood that.

Death was an awful thing to experience all on it's own, let alone the death of someone you loved so I never questioned it.

So as if hearing an evil, vampire stranger tell you that they were your dead mother wasn't terrifying enough, it was the fact that there was no real way for me to repudiate her claim that frightened me even more.

Lysander smiled down at me, scalding every moment of my shock. "Surprised?"

Didn't even come close.

She reached out towards my face, her pale skin moving seamlessly through the air. I flinched and instantly Lysander retracted her hand.

"I'm sure you have a great deal of questions for me, I myself have to admit to being equally surprised about all of this as well. Imagine my shock when one of the illegal intruders turns out to be my own flesh and blood." Lysander cooly smiled at me and it made my blood run dry.

Suddenly a door to our side magically opened itself. Lysander stepped aside and welcomed me into the room, beckoning me in first.

I was wary to say the least. We'd already traversed quite a distance from the audience hall and the farther we moved from there it meant farther I was from Matteo.

I paused in the frame of the large oak door, the room was empty and poorly lit like most of the lair. The only exception being a lone orb sitting atop a narrow pedestal. In the gloomy dark the crystal ball had a hazy green glow to it that lit up the room.

"All the answers you seek are just a few steps in front of you, dear one." Lysander purred and I hardly noticed because I was so mesmerized by the glowing crystal.

I felt it pulling me, like a million hands suddenly were reaching out and gently tugging at every wisp of my being to step in side of the room.

Won't you come inside?

I jumped and looked up at Lysander to see if she had just whispered to me but she was no longer standing beside me, she now stood along side the orb at the center of the room.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes as I stepped inside of the room and instantly the door closed itself behind me. I didn't even bother glancing behind me, my gaze was focused on the emanating green light before me.

Lysander smiled warmly and opened her arms for me to join her but I didn't need the invitation, my feet were already moving on their own accord until I was eye level with the orb.

Up close, it was even more mesmerizing if that was possible. It was a clear crystal sphere but it was surrounded by a green, almost fog like haze.

Lysander reached around me, enveloping me in her black robes and placed a spindly hand on the crystal. "Go on, don't be afraid, my child. Everything will be explained to you if you let the orb in."

Everything will be explained to me if I just let the orb in.

Answers, an explanation and an end to my constant state of confusion it's what I've dreamed of for the entirety of my life.

With a confidence unbeknownst to me, I firmly placed my palm against the crystal orb right beside Lysander's.

Instantly I felt a painful electric charge roll through my body that made my knees buckle but it was like my hand was now attached to the crystal.

The sphere lit up, blinding green light exploding through the room as it quietly reverberated under my hand.

All of the lights vanished as quickly as they came and when I looked to my side, once more Lysander was no longer beside me.

A hand was suddenly pressed against my forehead from behind, my eyes rolled back into the dark depths of my skull and I was surrounded by darkness.

I blinked slowly in the dark as a tiny light from somewhere far off began to grow and grow, it was the sun.

I held my hand in front of my eyes as I adjusted to the brightness of the space I now found myself in, I didn't know where I was but I knew that it was definitely not the room I originally entered.

A throat cleared from beside me and when I turned, Lysander stood next to me in a billowing white robe. Her red eyes twinkled down at me for a moment before she looked off and around at our surroundings that were beyond foreign to me.

"Where are we? Where did you take us?" I regretted going into that room, it had been one of my more stupid decisions as of lately.

Lysander didn't answer me, she instead placed a pale finger against her lips. We were outdoors in the middle of a forest that I had never seen before, there were birds chirping and flowers blooming, overall it was a peaceful scene.

That was until a piercing shriek ripped out across the serene woods, I jumped and Lysander's hand was suddenly clasping my shoulder and holding me in place. She wanted me to watch something. I followed her gaze and saw a woman pinned to the floor, she had short cropped brown hair and was visibly with child.

A pale man gripped her by the throat and kept her pinned and thrashing against the sweet forest grass by her fragile neck.

"Not the baby, please don't hurt my baby!" She screamed up at the creature and he smiled surely down at her and even from my distance, I could see the now all too familiar glint of vampire fangs in the sunlight.

Instinctively I lurched forward, I didn't know what I was planning to do but I knew that the pregnant woman needed help and I couldn't just sit by and do nothing at all. Lysander's grip was so firm and fast, she held me in place wanting me to watch what was taking place.

The vampire ignored her pleas and screams and drove his deadly fangs into the woman's neck and I had to turn away.

Lysander's eyes were glued to the scene before us, taking in every last gruesome detail of the attack. Her stare were glassy and there was even a ghost of a smile drawn across her features. Lysander dropped her hand from my shoulder and wordlessly began walking towards the woman and away from me.

I scrambled after Lysander and nervously followed her footsteps not wanting to draw the attention of the vampire but it was as if we were invisible to the beast. No matter how close we got, the creature nor the woman seemed to care in the slightest.

Suddenly the vampire stood up and I sucked in a breath, we'd gotten too close after all. He craned his head in the hair, lifting his nostrils to scan the air for a scent. Blood dripped freely from his lips, trailing down his jaw and dripping onto the forest floor right beside the poor woman he mauled.

There was the sound of a twig snapping off in the distance and the vampire sprung into action, he bolted away from the scene running straight towards me. Instinctively I threw my hands in front of my face to block the blow of a vampire retreating at full speed but the creature ran right through me as if I was made of air alone.

I gasped and clutched my stomach to assure myself that I was actually all there, how had that happened? My eyes darted over to Lysander to confirm that I wasn't losing my mind but she was knelt beside the woman who surprisingly was not dead.

She smiled fondly down at the woman and when she reached down to caress the terrified girl's face, her hand simply passed through the pregnant woman's body just as the vampire had through me.

"Don't be afraid, Olive. They cannot see us." She quietly informed me and her words beckoned me closer. I peered over her shoulder and instantly I gasped, the pregnant woman who was sprawled across the floor in a pool of her own blood was Lysander.

Lysander placed her hands against the grass and closed her eyes, "We are in my mind, this is one of my memories that we are walking through. This is the moment everything changed." She inhaled deeply before she stood up, "Changed for the both of us."

My heart dropped and so did my eyes, my gaze instantly landed on the pregnant woman's belly--on Lysander's stomach. That was me?

I took a step backwards as my mind raced a million miles a minute, struggling to process this new information. I didn't have to tackle it alone for long however, Lysander was keen to narrate what I'd just witnessed.

"I was a human, Olive. I was a human when your father met me." She glanced one last time over at herself on the ground before returning her full attention back to me. "These were our last human moments and we shared them together, Olive."

Bursting through the trees, my father emerged and ran to Lysander's aid. I wanted to cry and run to him, it was so good to see his face again but I knew it wasn't real.

He fell to his knees beside her just as a scream tore through her body, she clawed at her stomach and blood began to run down her legs. She was giving birth.

"Your father and I were both human at the time of your conception. You were supposed to have a normal life, but fate had other places for us all. I was forced into labor while going through the transformation from human to vampire. I gave birth to you, a beautiful baby girl; however with combination of vampiric venom in my system at the time we didn't know of you would survive." Lysander looked over me, her red eyes taking in every feature.

"Your father was attacked randomly by a rogue wolf a few days after your birth, the Pack that claimed the territory in which the attack took place assumed responsibility and welcomed you and your father in to their way of life. He explained to them what had all taken place in the short time after your birth but they would not allow me in so I left to allow you and your father the best possible chance at life. The pack welcomed you and your father and treated the pair of you as one of their own."

I was at a loss for words as I stared down at my palms. Just beneath this skin flowed blood that was not entirely human, not entirely werewolf and not entirely vampire yet at the same time all of them simultaneously.

Lysander sensed my confusion, "You are a vampire-human hybrid, Olive. There is nothing to fear, nothing about your life has to change with the knowledge of this, you've already lived eighteen years with it."

Olive! Olive! Olive, wake up!

I blinked slowly and pressed my hands to my head, "I'm not feeling so good." I moaned softly and twined my hands through my hair as the screaming intensified.

Olive! Please, wake up! Come back to me!

My vision blurred suddenly and the forest scene shifted back into the darkness of the room I originally found myself in.

I was torn away from the crystal, arms encircled around my waist and pulled me to the far end of the room. "Olive, are you alright? What happened?"

It was Matteo.

He held me so tightly against his body but I didn't care, I threw my arms around his neck in return and I never wanted to leave. Tears streamed down my face and he was quick to push my hair aside and catch my tears with his attentive hands.

I looked over his shoulder from his embrace and saw the door was ripped off of its hinges, I was too tired to wonder too deeply about how he got here. I was too tired to think about anything really, I just wanted to sleep.

I was tired.

So cold.

He gathered my hair and pushed it off of my neck to diminish the space between us even more and almost instantly Lysander gasped from across the room.

"You fool, what have you done to her?" Lysander screamed manically, "You've sentenced my only child to death!"

I turned ever so slightly within Matteo's cage like arms and realized that her eyes were locked onto my gruesome mark that was now painfully visible as Matteo had exposed my neck. It took me a moment longer but I too began to come to the same conclusion.

I was a human. I was a human who was born in the middle of a vampiric transformation, which meant some of that venom was within me somewhere as well.

Matteo bit me as an attempt to get me to turn into a werewolf when he learned that I was human.

A werewolf bite was lethal to a vampire and I just discovered that I was part vampire. Which only meant one thing...

I was dying.

Fun.